Zheng Guogu

Zheng Guogu Exhibited at The Saatchi Gallery

Zheng GuoguYear Two Thousand, Another Two Thousand Years to Rust

1999-2006

Set of 23 hand made and etched life size wine and beer bottles

In Year Two Thousand, Another Two Thousand Years To Rust Zheng uses iron for its connotations as primitive, industrial, and militaristic material, as well as for it’s sheer weight, to cast a variety of liquor bottles. Zheng’s sculpture makes reference to China’s fast expanding economy in relation to its millennia-old history, humorously posing the transient icons of commodity culture and frivolous indulgence as indestructible anti-ergonomic ballasts. In theory, each of Zheng’s bottles should take 2000 years to fully disintegrate, allegorically reversing the calendar of Western civilisation and restoring a balance of nature.

Zheng GuoguWaterfall

2003

Collaborative work with the Yangjiang group inc. Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin

Wax, calligraphy, metal armature

210 x 140 x 140 cm

Zheng Guogu’s sculptural work often combines enduring and imperious materials with unorthodox and fragile substances, the physicality of his forms operating as both tactile and symbolic matter. In Waterfall, melted wax pours over a metal ballast, literally freezing poetry in motion, embedding calligraphy scripts in the pristine fountain. Suggestive of a mountainous landscape, Waterfall is both illusory and monumental, creating an image of cyclical purity, a suspended and harmonious tension between permanence and temporality; its ethereal whiteness in Chinese culture signifies grief and mourning.

2004 Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia, San Diego Museum of Art The Exhibition of Express Mail Service, Shanghai, China ALL UNDER HEAVEN, Ancient and contemporary Chinese art, The Collection of the Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation, MuHKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp) and KMSKA (Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Antwerp), Belgium A l’ouest du sud de l’est, Center of Contemporary Art, Sète/Villa Arson in Nice, France Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From China, ICP International Center of Photography, New York, USA